Medical opinion on eggs is starting to turn sunny side up.

The latest evidence is a study showing that even people with moderately high cholesterol may be able to eat two a day without harm - as long as they lay off the bacon.Cholesterol in the bloodstream is bad for the heart. And since eggs have lots of cholesterol, experts have long assumed they must be bad, too. However, the reality is turning out to be more complicated.

It now appears that the cholesterol that people eat has little impact on the cholesterol in their bloodstreams. Eating an egg raises cholesterol only slightly, if at all, for most people.

Not all agree, but many experts are coming to believe that eggs have been unfairly demonized and that cholesterol in the diet is much less damaging than saturated fat.

"Two eggs a day don't make much difference if you follow a low-fat diet," said Barbara M. Retzlaff, a dietitian who presented the latest study Tuesday at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

Most of the evidence on eggs has come from experiments on healthy people with normal cholesterol levels. The study presented Tuesday, by researchers from the University of Washington, was different: It was conducted on people whose blood cholesterol levels averaged 227, which is somewhat above the recommended cutoff of 200.

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This work - like much current research on the health effect of eggs - was financed by the Egg Nutrition Board. The researchers said it was designed and conducted independently of the industry group.

The researchers recruited 141 volunteers. They were assigned to eat two eggs a day. Half got regular eggs. The rest got ones with the cholesterol removed. All the eggs were put through blenders so that the volunteers wouldn't know the difference.

After three months, the people were sick of eggs, but their total cholesterol had only edged up only modestly, to 233. Half the increase was in good cholesterol, the HDL, or high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which protects people from heart disease.

Dr. Robert Knopp, another of the researchers, said this suggests that the body produces more HDL to compensate for rising cholesterol levels in the diet.

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